What It Means To Fast Network - 43 Terabits Per Second

The research team from the Technical University of Denmark, which is the world's first Terabit managed to overcome the threshold data rate in 2009, set a new record 43 terabits per second over a single fiber optic link. In more understandable terms for all of us, this means that with it you would be able to completely download 1GB DVD-rip of 0.2 milliseconds.

The main feature of the world record is that this astronomical rate was achieved with a single laser and a single optical fiber. Today, there is already a lot of demonstrations transfer of hundreds and even thousands of terabits per second using multiple lasers and multiple fibers but it's so far from the reality of these fiber-optic networks that this makes no sense to even mention. When we talk about commercial fiber-optic lines, we nearly always talk about the systems, one laser one fiber because it is built on a foundation of the Internet architecture. In other words, the technique Danes has a chance to be translated into real network in the next few years.

But as the Danish Technical University was able to set his record? It's funny, but it was a cheat in some way. Although the researchers used only one laser, they are involved multi-core fiber. It remains single strand fiber, but it has a plurality of individual channels, each of which can transmit its own optical signal. In this case, the team used a multi-core optical fiber DTU with seven cores, manufactured by the Japanese telecom giant NTT.

Today most commercial lines provide fast data transfer rate of 100 gigabits per second. IEEE Association is currently exploring the possibility of introduction of 400GB / s or 1TB / s standard, but the ratification of this decision postponed for 2017 or beyond. Record DTU has a chance to push the bar available to us communication speed even further.